Full Tracklist Players, Facebook Love

By extremely popular demand, you can now go to any album page, click Share, and choose from a few different types of full tracklist embedded players. Like all our players, they’re clean, free of any Bandcamp branding, and streamlined for music listening and purchasing. Here, for example, is grande-with-tracklist (cover art is optional):

And here’s tall-with-tracklist:

We also recently introduced the ability to embed players into Facebook.* You can do so via the Share menu on Bandcamp, or just paste a track or album URL directly onto anyone’s wall or in your status on Facebook:

Shortly after Facebook embedding launched, one customer wrote on his blog: “I had such a good experience today purchasing some music that I thought I should share the user journey.” The full post, modestly titled “Saving an industry with better user experience,” nicely expresses the appreciation a fan feels when presented with a no-nonsense system for music discovery, listening and purchase. Glad to hear it Ben!

*You probably won’t be shocked to learn that 18 months ago, the number of fans sharing from Bandcamp to Facebook was dead-even with MySpace, whereas today, fan sharing to Facebook outnumbers MySpace 10 to 1.

I just tried posting one of my albums to my facebook news feed and it posted ok – however, when you click the play button the player simply disappears. May be my technical incompetence, but maybe not??

These are great. I’d like to see a “Tall w/no album art option” that can be pasted into my official website pages, where I already have a larger image of the album art. It looks funny to have the image twice on the same page. Or is there a class we can target in CSS to force-hide it?

@Slaughterback: MySpace has recently made some drastic changes to the content that they allow to be embedded, which basically totally hoses the way we do our players. We’re looking into solutions. We’ll update the blog post when we figure something out.

@Ry: To see the new player designs, go to Share -> Other (or many other options) to get a code that you embed on your blog, website, etc. If you choose Facebook, you do just get the URL to the album/track page, because that’s what you need to paste into your facebook post to get an embedded player. We’re still pondering how to make the plethora of player sizes available to Facebook.

@Testube: You’ll be pleased to know that we anticipated your request and I’ll soon be posting some details on how you (yes you) can arrange the parts of the embedded player however you want, including eliminating some (like the artwork) entirely. Want to taunt your fans with no play button? Want to swap Next and Previous just to be k-razy? Want to make the text HUGE? This can all be arranged.

@Jeremy, @Lenny: Yes, Facebook sharing doesn’t yet have all the options as the other players, but it’s not the same old, same old: until recently, all you could share on Facebook was a link back to your track or album. We understand the desire for MORE MORE MORE, of course, and will continue to make things even more awesome.

@esaruoho: it is possible you are reading my mind.

@Yianni: we don’t support transparent players. The best you can do at the moment is pick a background color that goes well with your site.

@Andreas: yes, we support WordPress. Just choose the appropriate flavor (wordpress.com or wordpress.org) from the Share menu.

@Chris, @Jonathan, I’ll be contacting you both to talk about your issues. They sound like bugs that I’d like to get to fixing right away.

If anyone else has a player support issue that I’ve missed, please email support@bandcamp.com and we’ll get you figured out.

This is great :) We’re now using these players as the basis for our label shop … one thing though… the “Buy” link on the player always goes straight to buying the download, even if a physical version is available. If someone clicks through from the embedded player ‘cos they want to buy the limited edition handmade cassette (or whatever), they have to close the pop-up box themselves and then click the link on the page to buy the physical object. Perhaps an option to include “Buy Download” and “Buy Physical” links on the embedded player might be handy?
Just a thought. x

While I do appreciate these embeddable players and absolutely give BC another A++++ for effort, some things unfortunately still fall short and should be addressed so that more of us “picky” types can fully utilize them.

1. Because of the default set widths, long song titles get cut off – which looks awful. Users should have full control over the height & width of whichever player style they choose so that they can properly incorporate them into their websites.

2. It would be nice if we had the choice of whether or not we want to display the band or albums names in these players since it can (and does) look a little redundant when they’re placed next to a release that already has a title section.

3. It would be REALLY cool if we had a checkbox option of whether or not we want all of our releases to be shared. For example, we might want to embed the players on our websites or networking sites, but don’t necessarily want 300 other people all doing it as well since it essentially just becomes free streaming with no need or obligation to ever buy. Obviously that is an unlikely scenario, but it IS a possibility nonetheless and could easily be remedied in our control panel options.

I have more suggestions/critiques/etc, but those three should cover it for now. Bandcamp is absolutely 95% perfect in the way it operates and offers services, but there are still a few very necessary (and extremely easy) tweaks that could/should be made to make it a near perfect service.

I agree with Chris’ assessment that Bandcamp is 95% awesome. In fact, I may even push that number as high as 98%. However, I also agree with his first criticism, about how long song and album titles get cut off in embedded players. That’s pretty bootleg, especially since even the new player embeds cut off my latest album title mid-word.

Bandcamp is a rock-solid platform for artists to sell their music and merchandise to their fans, and a thriving community of enlightened listeners who get that the best way to support the artists they love is by directly giving them money.